Korea Prepaid Card Invests in Blockchain Startup Bezant

Korea Prepaid Card has made an investment in Singapore-based Bezant, becoming the blockchain developer’s second largest shareholder.

First revealed in an announcement on Bezant’s website, the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Since April 2019, Bezant has been offering Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) using Hyperledger Fabric technology. It also has a cryptocurrency of its own, BZNT, ranked about number 320 in terms of capitalization at about $8 million, according to data from CoinMarketCap. In 2018, Bezant achieved the fastest-growing ICO in Asia, selling out available tokens in less than an hour, according to a company release.

The company has signed a number of partnerships. It is working with Hanjudo, a South Korean fintech, Thailand’s Nova Learning, Chequer, a South Korean database management company, and Transwiz, a Thai peer-to-peer lender, according to the company’s second quarter 2019 progress report. In June, Bezant announced that it would be joining Binance, and its token started trading on Binance DEX on July 7.

Korea Prepaid Card is an end-to-end solution provider for pre-paid cards and other related services, such as vouchers, virtual cards, pin-code cards and barcode-based coupons. It handles publishing, distribution, payment and settlement and has been developing technology to link the various participants in the pre-paid value chain in real time.

Bezant already has a strong connection to South Korea. Its chief cryptocurrency officer is Daesik Kim, who is also co-founder of Bithumb, a South Korean exchange ranked 17th in the world by reported volume, according to CoinMarketCap. The lead engineer for the company is Jeyce Jung, who was previously a lead software developer at KakaoPay specializing in fraud detection.